Magazine Flower Bouquet, Magnets

Magazine Flower Bouquet, Magnets

Writing is my preferred creative outlet, but every now and then I need to relax and disengage my mind a bit, and create something…else. Of course I love paper, and words, and words on paper, so my creations usually incorporate these elements somehow.

It all started with Pinterest. Somehow Connie Stewart’s Upcycled Magazine Flowers drew my eye, and I started punching out all magazine pages with interesting colors. I didn’t have any gifts to wrap or cards to make (Connie used hers to embellish gifts and cards), so I quickly devised a way to add a sturdy support (beer bottle cap) and stem (large paper clip). Once I started making these little lovelies, all I wanted to do was stay sequestered in my craft room hunched over my pile of used bottle caps, hot glue gun in hand.Start with Connie Stewart’s blog and make the flowers–she has an excellent step-by-step tutorial on there, which I won’t try to duplicate here. Once you have several flowers made, gather some bottle caps, paper clips and a piercer. And a hot glue gun, with lots of glue! Pierce each bottle cap in the center, and bend the end of a paper clip to insert it in the bottle cap and glue it in. You’ll have to hold the paper clip in place for a minute until the glue hardens as it tends to move around a bit.Once the paper clip is secured, pull the trigger on that glue gun until the bottle cap is about half full of glue. Insert the flower, pressing carefully in the center. The bottle cap will heat up quickly! The tricky part here is to avoid burning your fingertips off. I haven’t lost any fingerprints yet, but I can’t guarantee you won’t suffer a minor burn during this step of the process. After the glue is hardened, adjust/trim the paper clip stem as necessary to create different heights for the bouquet, and place them all in a small vase. Voila! Flowers that will never rot or die.

I also made some into magnets by gluing the flowers into bottle caps, then gluing a magnet on the back (instead of installing a paper clip stem). There must be other possibilities out there…see what you can come up with!